Rants

Posted on 7 Sep 2007 at 17:59

 

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The world and his wife may be making virtual 'friends' on social networking sites, but you won't find Mel Croucher - or his personal details - anywhere near MySpace or Facebook.

I come across many thoroughly contemptible people. They can be of any age, gender, faith, politics or nationality, but they all have one thing in common. That thing is the voluntary subjugation of their own personality by technology.

It seems to me that they are hardly capable of existing without an electronic affirmation of their status and popularity. Their camera phone contains hundreds of their favourite images and film clips. Their digital radio tuner invites them to pre-program a thousand of their favourite radio stations. They have an 80GB iPod, and boast that it can hold 20,000 of their favourite songs. But when I wrestle them to the ground and shove their shiny hardware down their slack-jawed gobs, yelling, "You can only have one favourite, not 20 bleeding thousand," they act as if it is me who is mad, not them.

And now their madness has spread to the ultimate expression of electronic onanism: social networking websites.

A week does not pass without some sad moron inviting me to sign up and become their friend on a network website. I no longer pity them: I despise them. You can almost hear them lisp, "Pwease be my wittle fwiend, pwease!" You can smell their fear of being viewed by others as a failure, if they cannot cajole enough people to declare themselves among the thousands of their extra special, most cherished wittle fwiends.

Anti-social

If you are not quite sure which social networking websites are frequented by what sort of people, here is a quick synopsis of the three I am most often invited to join. MySpace (100 million subscribers) is for morons; Facebook (30 million subscribers) is for morons with a degree; and LinkedIn (12 million subscribers) is for has-been morons with a degree.

If you're not quite sure how social networking sites work, you are far better off not knowing. It should be enough to understand that these sites have become a powerful and influential part of contemporary culture, and that they rely on peer pressure to enlist more and more morons. Just like claiming to have thousands of favourite images, music tracks or radio stations, it is nonsense to claim thousands of friends online. How many friends do any of us really have? I don't mean family members, workmates, neighbours, acquaintances or people we shagged while drunk, but real friends? Social websites are populated by legions of networking 'friends' who cannot possibly have more than the most shallow of relationships, and I suspect that most of them have never even met.

MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, the man after whom our greatest television playwright, Dennis Potter, named his terminal tumour. Facebook was launched by the alumni of George W Bush and is worth in excess of $1.6 billion. As for LinkedIn, the fact that it is an anagram of Dik Linen has not escaped me. But there is another aspect of the lemming-like rush by morons to demonstrate that they have more friends than is humanly possible. When morons embrace these mass networking websites, they lay themselves open to exploitation and danger.

Friends like these...

Most people spend time and effort protecting their data, shredding documents and guarding their privacy. They rail against the Surveillance Society, they mutter about credit card fraud and identity theft, and yet they blithely post photographs and personal details of themselves and their loved ones on these idiotic social networking sites. More than this, they pass public comment and invite public comment on anyone in their over-inflated list of 'friends' without restraint, until such time as somebody else comes along to amend, correct or distort whatever bumph and tosh has been posted.